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Postscript to my first experience running WordPress on PHP 7.0

It’s not much of a mystery anymore, but since this was my first, and somewhat unplanned, foray into working with PHP 7.0, I felt it was worthwhile to spend a bit more time today finally exploring which features from earlier versions are gone in PHP 7.0, so I’ll know if I am going to encounter any more challenges in the eventual, inevitable move to 7.0.

The best source I can find on the removals is this RFC from two years ago (!) that lists deprecated features under consideration for removal, all of which did eventually end up being removed. (I assume this is a complete list of the removals, since I can find no other more current list. But suffice to say it is clear that everything listed here was removed, even if it’s not all that was removed.)

I’m happy to see that the only thing in here that I have been using on any recent projects that was removed was the /e modifier for preg_replace(), which is what I uncovered as the source of the “mystery” in my last post. Of course, before this morning I’m not sure I even would have remembered that I was using it.

That said, I’m relatively confident that I am not using any of the other features, because while I had forgotten about the /e modifier, I at least know I use preg_replace() on a regular basis. Most of the other features in the list are things I don’t recall ever having seen before. Such is the nature of being a self-taught user of a language with over 5,000 built-in functions.

There’s only one other removed feature that I know I have used. A lot. It’s the mysql extension. It has been deprecated in favor of the mysqli extension for several years. But my own CMS, cms34, built originally in 2008 on the then-current version 1.2 of CakePHP, has mysql functions everywhere. I did eventually manage to update the platform to version 1.3.21 of CakePHP, but the leap to 2.0 was too arduous, and reworking hundreds of files to use mysqli functions was, likewise, something that never seemed justified. I stopped new development on cms34 in early 2014, but we still have many client sites running on it. I have committed to supporting them as long as necessary, but I am actively encouraging those clients to make the switch to WordPress.

The absolute incompatibility of cms34 with PHP 7.0 makes the merits of that switch a lot more obvious. And now the clock is ticking.

Bottom line for anyone who, like me, is still supporting legacy PHP 5 (or earlier!) code: change is coming.